Jill nodded, completely serious. “What else can we think? What I don’t get is this: even if there are subatomic black holes, an idea which we obviously can’t completely dismiss since we don’t appear to be on Earth anymore, how could something like that transport the two of us and leave us whole and alive?”
Nate thought about it. “Quantum leap?”
Jill chewed on a fingernail. She didn’t like the answer but didn’t have a better one.
“Or,” Nate added, getting into it, “since matter is essentially energy waves in the fifth dimension, maybe our energy waves were what were transferred and we simply ‘reprojected’ here. Kind of like a Star Trek teleporter?”
They looked at each other doubtfully. There was no answer to that, nothing that wasn’t embarrassing to even speculate. Neither of them said anything for a while.
“I was thinking…” Jill cleared her throat self-consciously. “I wonder if the black hole—if that’s what it was—was discovered through Kobinski’s work on the one-minus-one?”
Nate didn’t comment.
“The manuscript might be able to tell us. If we had it.”
“The manuscript!” Nate looked around, as if they might find it lying on the ground. “You’re sure it’s not here? I mean back there, where we, um, came in?”
“No. It was the first thing I looked for.” She shook her head impatiently. “Did you hear what I said, Nate? Using one-minus-one technology, Kobinski figured out how to travel through space-time!”
“He was working on a lot of things, from the look of it.”
“Yeah, and it’s all one-minus-one technology, Nate! Think about it!”
Nate wasn’t nearly as excited as she expected him to be. He rubbed a hand through his close-cropped hair, his face unreadable. “What about the others—Rabbi Handalman, Anatoli?”
She shrugged. “Back on Earth probably.” She thought of her bruised hand, and it occurred to her: You’d probably be there, too, Nate, if you had let go. She gazed up at him in surprise, but he didn’t appear to be thinking anything of the sort. He yawned.
“I hate to be a wet blanket, but theorizing isn’t going to get us food, water, or shelter, and this place isn’t exactly a 7-Eleven. The only thing I’ve seen which looks remotely edible is those giant bugs, and frankly…”
Jill couldn’t imagine it, either, but looking at the desert landscape, she thought they were lucky to have the bugs. Water was an even bigger issue. She was already parched.
“Let’s go a little further,” she suggested. “Maybe we’ll find something. Can you walk?”
“Of course.” But he gritted his teeth as he got up.
They’d walked a short distance when Nate spoke again. His voice was deliberately casual, as it always was when something was important to him. “Say, do you think there’s any chance we can get back home?”
“I don’t know,” Jill answered, just as casually. She picked up her pace so she wouldn’t have to see the look on his face.
The second sun was almost mid-sky when they saw the City. At first it looked like a mirage, unsubstantial as dust swirling above the desert floor. Their steps quickened—his, then hers—but they said nothing, each wanting to spare the other false hopes. Step by step, the phantom took form.
The outline of the City stretched for miles. Nothing led up to it; it was simply there, in the middle of the flat desert plain. There were no freeways leading in or out, no traffic on the streets inside the City or in the air above. There was a low wall around the perimeter that appeared to be made of polished red rock. A break in the wall led onto a smooth, paved street. There was no gate where the road met the sand; it simply terminated in a straight edge at the desert. Inside and outside: two sides of a coin.
The mass of the City was made up of buildings—white high-tech boxes as nondescript as children’s blocks. They were all exactly the same shade of white, and there was nothing to distinguish one from another except a variance in height and width. Windows were small and few, dark and blank as shark’s eyes. The street grid had an extreme orderliness, as if someone had neatly lined up the buildings, row upon row, with a ruler and plumb line.
The City looked manufactured; it did not look human.
They stopped at the perimeter. Jill had to work to achieve the kind of wariness she knew was appropriate. She had the strangest sense that the City was, simultaneously, both perfectly normal and dismissably unbelievable. Unbelievable because she’d been sure the insects in the desert would be the highest form of life on this planet; it seemed too dry and barren to have created a higher species. Unbelievable, too, in its surreal flatness. Yet there was also something about the City that seemed familiar—familiar enough to get under her guard. And that was dangerous.
“Look at this, Jill. It’s as if the red sand had suddenly risen up and… hardened in a tremendous heat.”
She tore her eyes away from the buildings. Nate was trailing his hand along the red perimeter wall. The top of it varied in height from two to four feet, in an irregular, wavy form that was at odds with the straight, orderly lines of the City. As her fingers brushed off its dusting of sand she saw that the wall wasn’t rock at all but red glass.
“You’re right. I think it is hardened sand. That’s weird.”
Nate went over to the break in the wall, where the street met the desert and abruptly ended. He dug his toe into the sand and then tapped. She didn’t need to see it to know that he’d encountered that hard, glassy surface a few inches down, as if the wall had been there, too, and had been cut away.
“It reminds me of The Wizard of Oz,” Nate said thoughtfully.
“Nate!” Jill cried in warning.
A round metal sphere hurtled toward them, flying down the street of the City. It was two feet in diameter, completely silver, and smooth except for a rectangular opening in one side. It stopped in front of Nate, its opening tilting up and down, regarding him head to foot. He froze.
“Don’t move,” Jill said in a low voice.
“Don’t worry,” Nate muttered.
The sphere flew with a zip over to Jill and “sensed” her as well, then zoomed off, disappearing back into the buildings.
“A sentry?” Nate suggested, letting out a relieved breath. “A camera?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe it’s gone to sound the alarm.”
Jill and Nate looked at each other. He looked wary at least. He looked scared. “I really don’t like this place, Jill. Maybe we should get out of here.”
“They’ll have water,” she said.
“Yeah.” The look on his face admitted defeat.
Jill’s mouth dredged up saliva at the thought. She shaded her eyes and regarded the City. But it wasn’t water that engendered the kernel of excitement in her belly, small and hard, that created that sense of attraction, of destiny. It was as if the City were calling her, as if she were home.
14.4. Thirty-Seventy Aharon Handalman
To reign is worth ambition, though in helclass="underline"
Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.
—Satan in Paradise Lost, by John Milton, 1667
They were carrying him up crude steps. Aharon could see the pitted stone through the coarse weave of the blanket that covered him, slung as he was like an anchor over a monstrous freak’s back. There was no breath and no room to take it in; his soft stomach was crushed against the thing’s shoulder even as he shivered violently from a bone-deep chill. God help him, he was about to pass out from the pain! Maybe that would be a mercy.
Doors opened and he was dimly aware that they’d entered a large room. Through the blanket he got blurry glimpses of stone benches and hairy, brutal figures. The room was full of beasts, growling and frothing. His heart slammed in his chest. He could smell them, these… creatures: smell sweat and, and musk, and some other stink—dark and earthy and pungent as the dead. On top of his terror, the revolting smell was enough to make him sick. He retched, halfheartedly; then the floor rose up to meet him as he was dumped, head cracking on hard stone. The blanket was yanked off. Aharon cringed as howls and animal screams rose in the room.